In her book Gender Trouble, Judith Butler identifies an unsettling problem at the heart of the idea of feminism. Feminism, she argues, imagines the idea of ‘women’ as a common identity that all women share and that unites them all. But where does our idea of what ‘women’ are come from?

Duncan Macmillan’s People, Places and Things is an unusual play because we see the events of the story subjectively, though the eyes of its main character, Emma. We experience the world as she experiences it. When Emma takes drugs, the lights glow brighter and voices slow down. People seem to become other people. Objects disappear and reappear unexpectedly. When her experience of events becomes fragmented, the action of the play becomes fragmented. We see her world from the inside, as opposed to seeing the reality of the events that she is experiencing from the outside.

In 1979, while living in New York, David Hare met Tennessee Williams. The two writers soon became good friends. In this extract from his new memoir The Blue Touch Paper, David Hare remembers and reflects upon their friendship.

How is technology changing the way that we stage and design a production? What new possibilities might digital technology open up for theatre designers in the future?

From the Deus Ex Machina of Ancient Greek Theatre to the invention of the electric lantern in the late nineteenth century, technology has had a huge impact on the ways in which we stage a performance. Olivier Award Winning Set Designer Es Devlin (Chimerica, American Psycho, The Nether) and Luke Halls (I Can’t Sing!, Olympic and Paralympic Closing Ceremonies) discuss how digital technology is currently revolutionising the world of theatre design.

How do we create a theatre for the digital age? Is technology fundamentally changing the ways in which we engage with and make performance?

Matt Adams (Co-Founder and Artist, Blast Theory), David Sabel (Head of Broadcast and Digital at the National Theatre) and Tassos Stevens (Co-Director, Coney) discuss how digital technology is revolutionising performance.

Are games a dangerous and anti-social addiction? Might gaming be able to save the world? How is gaming culture changing the kinds of stories that we tell and how we engage with them?

Join playwright and gamer Rory Mullarkey (Cannibals) and Iain Simons (Director of the GameCity Festival and co-founder of the National Videogame Archive) to explore how gaming has developed from Pong to Destiny and to discuss where gaming might take us in the future.

How do you write a play about the ethics of online existence? How do you stage a virtual world?

Playwright Jennifer Haley and director Jeremy Herrin discuss The Nether and the process behind creating Headlong and the Royal Court’s production of the show, in a discussion chaired by Headlong's Associate Artist, Sarah Grochala.

On 14 April 2010, three weeks before the general election, David Hare was on stage for a Platform talk at the Lyttelton Theatre and spoke of a frustrating failure. His play The Absence of War, premiered in the Olivier in 1993, had fictionalized Labour’s doomed 1992 election campaign, which ended with John Major still in Number Ten, and was followed by Neil Kinnock’s resignation as party leader, and, under John Smith and Tony Blair, the birth of New Labour. Hare told his Platform audience that he had been unable to convince any producing theatre to revive The Absence of War for the 2010 poll: “It is about the roots of New Labour and, now that we assume New Labour is coming to an end in three weeks’ time, it would be fantastic to show that play.”